Doctrine of Shadows: How America’s First Spy was Forged Beneath the Founding Fathers (Secrets of the Republic Book 3)

Description

The Republic was still raw. The streets smelled of coal smoke, wet hemp, and salt from the harbor. Boots scraped stone, wagon wheels clanged iron, and the air carried the sharp tang of ink from presses that never stopped. Beneath all that noise ran another current—ledgers hidden in damp cellars, couriers slipping through alleys, truths carried in silence like a second skin.

Cyrus learned to live inside that silence. He tasted ash in taverns where cheap gin burned his throat, pipe smoke hung low, and floorboards groaned under the weight of secrets. Ink stained his fingers, metallic on his tongue, as he copied names meant to be forgotten. Across the table, Smith watched without a word. His stillness pressed on the air. Even a candle flame bent toward him.

Doctrine’s work never announced itself. A rumor buried in Boston tilted a vote. A false manifest in Bordeaux changed the course of ships. In Baltimore, the clatter of a press was stopped cold, leaving only the smell of ink and the memory of what almost caught fire.

Others followed their own doctrine. Camille moved with citrus on her breath and steel in her hand. Her smile cut as deep as her knife, leaving blood, silence, and choices that never healed clean.

The Doctrine never promised to tell the truth. It only carried it—in the smoke of taverns, the salt of harbors, the scrape of iron gates, the weight of names struck from the page but never erased from memory. And in that silence, the Republic’s fate balanced, like breath waiting for the blade to fall.